Holiday Special: Request for Startups

So I think there should be a company whose sole revenue model is employing unimpressive children of rich parents, and the parents pay that company to give them titles. And because you need it so that, so that when their, you know, busybody friends are checking LinkedIn to see like, oh, is, is so-and-so's son really a VP of brand strategy, they can see, oh, they actually have this big organization under them. If they ever stop paying, what happens is the child gets told Look, your parents bought you this job. So this, it's kind of an extortion racket too. There was a big trend in 2013 of training people to become software developers. Oh, these coal miners are getting laid off. Like, what should we do? Like, like, learn to code. The journalists are getting laid off.

What should we do?

Learn to code. I think what we need now is a boot camp to turn all these software developers who are going to have no job because of AI back into coal miners so that countries in Europe who've turned off all of their nuclear reactors can operate their coal mining plants.

The circle of life. Yeah.

When Google's laying people off, we can be like, yo, bro, learn to mine.

This week on Upstream, we're trying something a little bit different. This is a new show format where I and some friends go over startup ideas, some serious, some humorous. Let us know in the comments if you like this, and we'll release more of it. Please note that this episode has some vulgar humor, so it won't be for everyone. Enjoy the conversation.

Okay, ideas guy, let's, uh, let's start with you. Why don't you introduce your first, uh, your first idea? It could be the high-status employment as a service or anyone you want to go with. Why don't you start us off?

Give us your biggest, thickest idea.

So there are a lot of rich parents in America who have unimpressive children. And it may not be all their children. It just may be sort of one of them is particularly unimpressive. And that child is often a shame to them. And they go out to parties and they have conversations and it's rough. So they would love— how much would that parent give to be able to say, oh yeah, my son or daughter is the VP of brand strategy at some cool brand company. Maybe you haven't heard of it, but the title says a lot. So I think there should be a company whose sole revenue model is employing children, the sort of unimpressive children of rich parents. And the parents pay that company to give them titles. And that company has to get really big because ultimately it has to have lots of different divisions. So there can be lots of VPs of brand strategy and lots of just different divisions.

It's very important.

Nick, you're really kicking this off with the relatable component. I mean, Paul Graham always says you have to This is my own problem.

My 2-year-old, it really brings nothing to the table. And so I hope to build this for myself personally. And part of the business model can be, okay, the more you pay, the bigger title that you get.

And the bigger org because you can employ, you can talk about the most premium package, you get this huge reporting structure. I got 50 people globally in my org and you just have to, The more premium packages, they just pay those salaries. It's fine.

Absolutely. Because you need it so that when their busybody friends are checking LinkedIn to see like, oh, is so-and-so's son really a VP of brand strategy? They can see, oh, they actually have this big organization under them. The whole company, there's a group of people at the company who are actually paid by the company to build the brand of the company. In terms of product, there's very little going on, as there shouldn't be. You don't want to create too much surface area for attack or for unhappy customers because they have a whole group of executives who truly do nothing. There are a lot of retreats and trips to Tulum. And part of it is the question that I've always been thinking about is, do you want that child to feel like they actually have a real job? Is part of it not just the appearance of a job, but actually giving them a job that is easy enough where they can't really screw it up, where they're getting great performance reviews, but they are able to come home, have something to talk about? Then if it wasn't good enough, you can imagine that the parents, if they ever stop paying, what happens is the child gets told, look, your parents bought you this job. So this, it's kind of an extortion racket too.

Extremely good LTV. Erik, as the master of minting high-status communities, how would you bootstrap the status of this organization?

Well, I just will say it's fascinating because, you know, I've been involved in an organization that overhired significantly. There are lots of organizations that are overhiring significantly. Everyone feels great about it. It's not a fun way.

It's not a Snap FM. Yes, exactly.

And it's a high-status thing to do. And the challenge is there's usually not a business model with overhiring significantly.

Until now.

Exactly. This is what we were missing. And there's this great slogan by this company I really admire. It was called— the slogan was, they pretend to pay us and we pretend to work. And that— It was the USSR.

I was going to say.

And yeah, so there's some historical examples we could point to of operations that have just gotten a lot of buzz.

So, Nick, if you start with a totalitarian overthrow of a large geographic landmass, this is very much within your reach.

What is the difference between this idea and tenure or a postdoc position in the humanities? Whoa, whoa, whoa.

Very little.

Very exciting idea here. There is something to the idea of people wanting to pay for their kids to have high status. So there is something here. Unless anything else about this idea, let's transition to Sean. Why don't you share one of your ideas?

So this is really just a modern improvement of something that already exists. I'm in San Francisco and I think in the past year, me and my now wife, we got married this weekend, wahoo for us. We've experienced 4,000—

Congrats.

Thank you. Thank you. I was asking for some congratulations, Justin. You're the only person that got the cue.

Yay.

Let's talk Prina. So look, prenups are really difficult.

We've experienced a lot of property crime. We live in a nice neighborhood in San Francisco, to the extent that that exists. And, you know, we've experienced 2 catalytic converter thefts, a hit-and-run, a car window break-in. And just this morning, our whole block's every mailbox was cracked open and all the mail was stolen. And I was thinking there really should be some type of solution for this. Maybe you would hope perhaps institutional, but I think we can also do it sort of bottoms up. I was thinking maybe we hire a guy, could be a gal, probably a guy, to sit in a car, maybe some lights on top. And I think if the whole community really just— we only just need to do a couple blocks, my block, the other block, we just sort of all pool together, then maybe, just maybe, we can put a guy there to stop people from doing these types of things in the dead of night. I still feel like it would cost that much. So I'm thinking we should maybe create some structured protection service available to people that are living in high-propensity crime areas.

So I feel like you glossed over the fact that you said you were in a hit-and-run, which seems like a violently intense crime to experience. And then you talked about your mailbox being stolen. So can we like double-click on you experiencing a hit-and-run and then having that be less important than your mail getting fucking stolen?

You know, there's, uh, there's recency bias, and the mail was this morning and the hit and run was 3 weeks ago, so it's, it's way out of my mind at this point.

Dude, you, you don't know what was in his mailbox.

Seriously, the, uh, the hit and run was— the hit and run was basic. Basically, our car was parked there and then it was hit and screwed up, and then who knows how. It didn't make any sense, actually. Mangled.

Look, I'm, I'm gonna leave this podcast if this becomes a San Francisco-hating podcast. We cannot have another one of these. We can't give these, these avid listeners more red meat that they're craving.

No, Nick, I'm a San Fran— I'm actually a San Francisco optimist. The way that I see it is we can just accept that there's institutions that won't exist, uh, provided by the government, and so therefore we should produce privatized solutions to them. And I feel like, look, $4,000 a year for one household, there's at least 40 households on my block. That's like a pretty good— that's a full salary plus some.

One of the things I admire about Sean is that usually what happens when you walk through San Francisco and you see someone doing like pooping on the street or doing drugs wherever, is people just walk past them and are like, okay, let me not look at this. And Sean is like, hey, that's gross. And the person has not been talked to by anyone for a year, so they're just bamboozled doing whatever they've been doing. And I admire Sean's courage to spark these people's interest.

Well, it seems to be working also. Hasn't property crime, poops, all trending down to the right since Sean started shiting them?

Well, his catalytic converters are getting stolen, so I think he's developing a reputation.

Nick, it's during my off shift. I'm sleeping when that's happening.

Justin, why don't we transition to you? Why don't you share one of your ideas?

So an idea that I just had while making a prenup joke was I feel like everyone in a prenup, or the 2 people in the prenups for now, are always sort of like, it's one of the weird times in your relationship that you're Sort of on looking out for yourself. You've sort of made this commitment and you're like, okay, we're getting married. We're thinking about kids. We're doing the house thing together. Everything is a we. And then when you're negotiating a prenup, it's back to I. And then it's this weird, well, if you don't work for 22 years and then we get divorced, how much should you get? And all this sort of stuff. And so basically, I think that there should be a company that you could just credibly pay That like 2 people answer surveys, spits out here's what a prenup would look like. And then both of you pay and there's a 50% chance that one prenup goes like it goes with Shawn's prenup and there's a 50% chance that it goes with the other person's prenup and it's fully legally binding. You just hit the buy button and it like randomly chooses one of the 2 options, which would pull both of you towards the center in terms of like what you're negotiating for from a prenup standpoint.

It's like I cut, you choose with dividing a pie type of thing.

Yeah, exactly. I think it'd be kind of an interesting way to do it.

Justin, did you say we're going to just talk about 2 parties for now as if polygamy is on the horizon?

They're called polycules, dude. I don't know if you've read about them.

That's a great upsell. Polycule prenups.

Yeah. Extraordinarily more complex. It's sort of like the 3-body problem but applied to legal contracts.

The riches are in the niches, as they say. Molecule prenups are the niches, but are they growing?

Yes.

The polyamory movement should be called the 3-body solution. Nick, why don't we go back to one of your ideas? You've got a few here.

Erik's not impressed with Prenup.

Got it.

That's okay. It's more of a feature.

Vitamin, not a painkiller. As the relatable one on the podcast, I like ideas that are, you know, that like the everyman can understand, like restaurants and food. And so as an MBA, one of the things that you learn is you take— is most If you've done like an operations class, one of the big cases that you cover is Benihana. And Benihana is very impressive because they turn tables really fast because they have a hibachi chef who's like doing their thing, but it's very well timed so they can like turn a table in an hour. And so it's just sort of a— it's the case study. And I am a big fan of brunch. And I think that the combination of Benihana and brunch, a.k.a. Brunchihana, is just so obviously good that it's crazy that no one's thought of it. Because think of the most operationally efficient model with the cheapest inputs, which is like all the eggs and bread and stuff like that. And on a hibachi grill, you can literally make any brunch item that you can imagine. You can do bottomless mimosas, you could have an afterparty that you go to upstairs once your table has turned.

What's in the afterparty? How does, how does this work?

Well, so, so here's the thing. So, so what I heard, and I have not looked it up because it was too good to look up and I just want to believe it, is that Steve Aoki is part of the Benihana fortune. And you could imagine the way that we are, we can, you know, leverage the Benihana name, because I think Brunchy Hana is too good of a name to pass up, is you get Steve Aoki involved, he's a big investor. He's DJing the afterparty.

And Steve just hasn't gone to sleep yet.

That's—

that tends to be because, you know, he rolled all the way straight from the party to the after-after-afterparty, which is Brunchy Hondo.

Absolutely. And also, you know, why does brunch just have to happen during brunch hours? It can happen anytime. People love brunch. Brunch is a meal that is fun and you're with your friends and just— it would be— it's what the world needs.

I was going to say I like that idea and then talk about my idea, but I'm not sure if I like that idea. I think it's an interesting idea, but it is inspiration for another idea I had.

What's going on here?

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You guys know Daybreaker? It's like party in the morning.

Of course.

So I like that format, which is taking things that people enjoy and saying, hey, could they be at a different time or different format or things like that? So Daybreaker, you know, it's taking a party, it's putting in— dance party, putting in the morning. People love it. You do it before work, gets you excited, et cetera. You don't drink, so you're healthy. And so, I'm curious for something at night. I'm calling it Fit Club. It's basically like a Barry's Bootcamp or some workout fitness class, but in the evening that then afterwards people go shower and then there's like food and it's like a party. It's like workout plus party, but you don't—

Plus shower food.

Sick.

We only serve hot dogs.

So I think, I mean, if you could go out at night and get healthier and also meet people and potentially find someone to spend your life with—

In the shower?

With a friend.

So it's at a middle school? Okay.

Don't over-rotate on the shower. The shower is just the wedge.

It's optional. It's encouraged.

But then afterwards, it's just, you know, everyone's in a good mood. People are excited to meet each other. You're getting fit, and now you want to get to know each other. And that's social activity in the evening.

People seem hungry. Maybe they would want to come to Brunchy Hana and they could enjoy the synergies of brunch and fitness.

Yeah.

I think this is an incredible idea.

Really?

I do.

So, I have been talking about this idea of wellness as entertainment, but basically, I feel like I'm starting to see a bunch of companies that are in the wellness space go beyond just like, I'm hitting a SoulCycle class only to get stronger, fitter, lose weight, whatever. But, they're actually like, it's becoming part of their identity and it's becoming an entertainment thing. Oh, I'm bored. I may as well go work out at Barry's or do SoulCycle or whatever. And, I think that doing a nighttime activity that got you fitter, got you naturally high on your own endorphins or whatever, and that is way more likely to be your people if you're a fitness person, if you want to meet other people that are into this stuff, would be amazing.

Yeah.

If you're a single fitness-obsessed person, you're unlikely to meet a potential partner or mate or something if you just go to Paddy's Irish Pub and say no to the Guinness or something. But, if you do something like this, you're way more likely to meet your type of person there. So, I think it's a really cool idea. And actually, there's a couple companies mostly in the new bathhouse space to the extent that that's a space that are starting to Open up things like late night sessions. And so you can go do a sauna cold plunge, breathwork, hang in the bathhouse thing on a Friday, Saturday, Sunday thing, which I think is kind of sweet. I would totally do that.

I think the coolest thing about running this type of business, it would just be that it would be fun to own the types of spaces that you would do this. So Justin and I went to this spa in France last summer, and it was just this incredibly beautiful space on this incredible land. It was like this old building in this beautiful place. And I looked up the company, it was called QC Terme, and it was 2 brothers that owned like 20 of these things or something in that order. And they own like 20 beautiful pieces of real estate that the world's wealthy, fit people come to and have the best time of their lives at. And I'm like, What an incredible business to just own, right? It's not venture scalable. It's not going to be worth billions, but so cool. Just so cool. What a great lifestyle.

And Sean, you saw it. Wouldn't you do that at 10 or 11 PM on Thursday, Friday, Saturday, whatever? Especially you don't drink. How sweet would that be?

I don't drink. I like going out. I like working out. I sometimes like working out and then going out. So Erik, I'm into it. It's Friday night. You got to get a pre-going-out pump in. So why not just make that part of the experience?

Exactly.

I'm into it.

Like, a spa for rich people is incredible to own. But like, the process when you're sort of still the GM, it feels like the type of things that you deal with on a day-to-day basis, like, range from really upset rich people and just grossness. Like, I knew somebody, I lived with somebody who ran like, like an office cleaning company, and like the things that he had to deal with on kind of like a, like a regular basis Like as the sort of owner proprietor of this company, we're just like, you just, you amass some good stories, I guess. And so spa feels fun to own once it's at scale and you can hire your GM.

One of my first jobs was a janitor at LA Fitness. And my, literally my first day, I walk in to clean the men's locker room and someone had waffle stomped a turd into the shower drain. Do you know what waffle stomping is? I don't know what waffle stomping is. He like pooped on the shower drain and then shoved it into the drain. And so I had to get a little fucking pick and like pick dried shit out of the grate of the shower drain for my first day. That was literally within the first 60 minutes of my job at this fitness place. So I agree with you, Nick, there are certainly downsides.

Did you, did you know the term waffle stomp?

No.

Was it like, oh, like, I fucking waffle stomped this gym?

Like, I did not. I found out after doing this horrible job. Uh, it took me all of 60 minutes to find out what it was.

Justin, why did you choose to poop that way? The brunch and hot dog thing is interesting. I mean, do you remember the combination Taco Bell Pizza Hut?

I think it was Taco Bell, KFC, wasn't it?

It was KFC.

I think it was Taco Bell, KFC.

No, no, no, no, no. It's—

Erik just drove by that in his limo as a child growing up. My family actually walked inside and had to order from there.

I was VP of strategy. Go for it, Nick. Nick defends my honor.

I was just going to clarify that it was KFC, Taco Bell, and Pizza Hut were all linked together. There's a whole song that goes, I'm at the Pizza Hut. I'm at the Taco Bell. I'm at the combination Pizza Hut. So I'm certain.

Wow.

Yeah.

What artist was that? That's beautiful.

It's called Das Racist. Amazing artist.

What podcast have I stumbled into?

That was his hit single. He's now in the ads business, I believe. But at the time he was, yeah, big-time rapper.

The greatest minds of our generation.

Yes, exactly.

Slinging ads.

Exactly. Sean, why don't we transition to one of your other ideas you haven't shared yet?

This is a more very practical idea and I specifically would like the audience to tell me how to do it, what's interesting. I don't actually know much about doing these things in practice, but it's very clear that professional services are going to become disrupted. It's happening for the first time. Professional services was sort of a domain where tech was not very valuable because the work was generally à la carte. It was very consulting-driven, dot, dot, dot. And the rise of LLMs is changing that completely. We saw today that PricewaterhouseCoopers has announced a $1 billion investment in generative AI across their firm. That to me is very interesting and very surprising. I'm curious just how the structure of a deal like that goes down. PricewaterhouseCoopers is really like a collection of firms. They're not one corporation. It's like a unified brand. It's a complex thing. I wonder how these centralized services get deployed into a company like that and how the economics get shared. But I think that them putting that type of money into the thing makes it very clear that the whole category of professional services is now disruptible. It's on the table and nobody else is pursuing it just yet. You see some of the companies doing it in law, but I think a lot of the alpha here is going to be just in the existing books of business. Getting transitions, stealing a book of business is much harder because you're losing a lot of context. So I think that it's possible to do a roll-up of these types of businesses, combine the best of generative technology as sort of— The thing that the big Platforms aren't going to do. OpenAI is not going to do law because actually practicing law requires a bunch of stuff. So there's an opportunity to be their best customer in that vertical. And I think that every professional services vertical has that opportunity. And yeah, I'd love for somebody to explain to me how the math there works, but it feels to me like there's a very clear opportunity there.

Sean, I think that was too good of an idea. Just knowing you had a consulting background.

I'm literally thinking that we just went from waffle stomping to this.

But there really is $1.7 trillion in market cap of professional services businesses. So the opportunity is actually very large and none of those companies are GPT-enabled. So sprinkle on some AI pixie dust and maybe magic happens.

When a company like that says they're going to invest $1 billion in generative AI, what does that actually look like in terms of what they're allocating dollars to? Because I'm trying to think about that from an opportunity standpoint. So I'm an angel investor, venture partner at a VC fund, which basically means I'm part-time. There's a big open question around what do you actually invest in with all this AI stuff because it's moving so quickly and it's hyper unclear where you actually can put money in and get some result out that OpenAI isn't already working on or Anthropic or whoever, that they're not already working on and about to release in a couple weeks. So did you see or have any details around How they will actually spend that money.

Somebody please DM us on Twitter and tell us the secrets of the capital allocation there. I assume that they're investing largely internal salaries to actually put use cases together here, but if they're buying external vendors, let us know what they're looking for and we'll talk about the good ideas that they need to exist on the pod. And sort of help accelerate their product development.

I bet they're going to pay McKinsey a lot of money to help them, give them advice on how they can incorporate AI into their workflows more effectively.

Probably right.

Pretty Lindy. Yeah, yeah.

These, these consulting firms are gonna just like clean up over the next few years. It may be their like last gasp, but like The pivot of every company to AI and needing some consultants to come in and tell you what to do is— that's going to be huge. I feel very bullish on the very, very short term of these big management consulting firms.

I mean, a lot of these management consulting firms have been over the last 10 years buying and building software products internally, and some of them are increasingly pretty big, right? Justin, your wife worked on some things in that area, right?

Yeah, exactly. She was at Deloitte doing internal software freelancing, software tools freelancing, marketplaces, all that kind of thing.

Yeah.

And they're substantial, but there's also like, maybe this is the wrong way to think about it, but if I'm thinking about these big consulting firms, none of them have spun out a product that kind of lived on its own as a software product. And I wonder if How much of these big consulting firms investing money in internal software tooling actually made its way to the end user in some way or impacted the bottom line? I don't know. I'd be kind of curious. And I kind of wonder the same with AI stuff. I mean, I guess, do you hire fewer junior consultants? Do you increase the billing rate? I'm just so curious how this stuff actually works its way through the system. But I do agree that consulting is probably a really good place that you can get leverage even from what GPT can already do from a research, writing, and other standpoint.

Do you feel like that's why this makes a good opportunity from the outside? Because these corporations, these big ones, these firms are so complex from an economic sharing standpoint. PricewaterhouseCoopers, for example, has 350,000 employees and hundreds of corporate entities and partners with interlocking voting rights. There's all this stuff that they have to navigate organizationally to make use of these things. If you went out and built it from scratch, you start with a cleaner legal and operating structure that allows you to deploy the tech in really rapidly. And you're able to also adapt your billing model, right? When your whole business, these white shoe law firms, for example, their whole business lives and dies by billable hours. If you're in the billable hours business and there's some tool that reduces billable hours, you don't want that thing, right? So that's amenable to disruption from the exterior because inside there's just very few firms that are going to successfully navigate that transition.

One of the things I keep wondering is when we're going to see more, whether it's independent consultants or consulting shops that bill themselves as AI-enabled and where you can feel certain that you're getting the appropriate price of an AI-enabled talented professional. And what I mean by that is, Sean and I are working on a new version of our website and we would love to have a copywriter that was AI-enabled. Right now we're working with GPT-4 and there's a big delta between GPT-4 for free and an expensive copywriter. But it feels like there would be a big appetite for a copywriter with good judgment who can use the tools very, very well.

There's a company called Jasper. There's also CopyAI. Some of these that are doing this that are Built on top of OpenAI, on top of GPT, that are copywriting tools that are pretty good. Something I've been wondering is for the last 15 to 20 years, the model in software has sort of been build everything self-service because humans are very expensive. And so you have all of these support, onboarding, you have a bunch of this cruft that is geared towards the better business model of everyone is self-service. And I wonder if the model will soon shift to much more personalized concierge onboarding to use a piece of software or a tool. But a lot of that is provided by some combination of AI chatbots plus some human overlooking this.

More talent networks embedded in products? Is that the direction that you're thinking? How cool would it be if on Jasper you could Tap in an expert copywriter who's going to use Jasper and really push it to that next level without having to start from scratch.

Yeah.

Or even just think about the deltas that people will pay just to have a new tool implemented for them. Salesforce consultants get paid hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. There's entire firms that just implement Salesforce for you. And I'm not saying that that is a great thing, But it's clearly, if you can afford it and if it's important enough, you kind of want the concierge onboarding thing. Superhuman got so much press and great user engagement for their concierge one-on-one onboarding. I just wonder if that becomes table stakes and you just get way more personalized but using AI to get leverage on the personalized onboarding thing and all of the best-in-class stuff around onboarding and all of All of these different things that Silicon Valley's gotten really good at over the last decade kind of become not as useful.

I mean, this is actually very relevant to just the roll-up of professional services that I was just talking about. For example, Deloitte, they are the preferred integrator for, I believe, both SAP and Oracle or for some of the 2 big ERPs. And that part of their practice alone, just being a preferred integrator for those, is a multi-billion dollar a year revenue line for them. And they're doing a little bit of technical integration, but they're also doing the organizational deployment. They're going in there and training up every different manager on how to input their receipts into this expense management software or whatever else. And it's a big complex thing. And I think you're right that you do still need a combination of humans because if you're going to do an in-person training, people like to listen People don't want to listen to a recording. There's a reason why in-person training still exists in a world where there's lots and lots and lots of content on YouTube. But there is also still a lot of it that you can make way more personalized, like the worksheets that go after the training or whatever can all be more AI-enabled. That'd be pretty interesting.

Justin, why don't we transition to one of your ideas?

Basically, I have more of a— I won't do a plug, so I'll just speak in generalities, but I have a consumer health background. And so, something that I've been just aware of quite a lot is the trend that is hugely growing around people struggling to get pregnant and have kids. And, I think that if you look at a lot of studies, it's actually the food that you eat, your obesity, levels of inflammation, all these sorts of things have huge— your chemical load and exposure Have huge, huge impacts on how likely you are to get pregnant, both on the male and female side. This is not just a female-only thing. And you have people spending— if you go through IVF, it is months of work, daily injections into your womb basically as a female. The cost of IVF can range from anywhere to $10,000 to $30,000. It's often not very well financed. It's often not covered by insurance or companies. unless you work at a fancy tech company. And, when people talk about, oh, just freeze your eggs, it'll be fine. If you ever look at data, which no one talks about, which I think is basically criminal, is if you look at data, most pregnancies well north of 50%, it's around 60% to 70% of women that go through the egg freezing and implantation process don't actually result in a baby. And so, I think that there's this huge problem where you have a lot of people that want to have a child, are spending a lot of money, are going through a ton of pain to do this and they're not able to. I basically think that a huge number of people that can't get pregnant partially because or largely due to lifestyle factors. And so, I think there's a really interesting opportunity basically to build a natural health protocol That combines some drugs like progesterone and others along with a bunch of lifestyle modifications to eat a low inflammation diet, to eat healthy, clean, check on your toxin load, do a bunch of these things and massively increase your odds of conceiving and carrying a baby to term, again, on both the male and the female side. And, you've kind of seen this in some other spheres. Calibrate is this weight loss company that's doing I think over $100 million a year. They're combining lifestyle interventions with pharmaceutical interventions that drive much better outcomes. And, I think that there's a big company to be built in the fertility space doing the same thing.

What does Calibrate do? Is that weight loss?

Yeah, it's like a Wegovy, Ozempic thing. So, you get the weight loss injections. You do it right now, Ozempic, Wegovy, whatever, these GLP-1 agonists, you take them I believe it's every week for the rest of your life to lose weight. That is obviously brutal. It comes at at least a $15,000 a year sort of price tag. It's crazy. And so, what Calibrate is doing is basically saying, hey, insurers, rather than take on the burden of paying $15K per year indefinitely for this person, pay us for 1 year. We provide this GLP-1 agonist prescription. We then also have a coach, lifestyle modifications, all these sorts of lifestyle things. So that at the end of the period, they can roll off the drugs, the GLP-1 agonists, and stick with the Calibrate program that is purely lifestyle moderation or modification. And basically, the insurer is like, okay, I pay Calibrate $300 a month or $100, whatever it is, rather than $15,000 a year just to keep them on the drugs indefinitely.

Justin, what do you think in the set of normal things you'd recommend for someone to be healthy make the biggest difference for fertility, both for men and for women, which I imagine are maybe a little bit separate?

I think it's generally like obesity and inflammation are probably like the 2 biggest things that you can, that you can focus on. Yeah, I think those are by far the 2 things that if you want to try and get pregnant, probably moving markers of inflammation and becoming, and like losing weight if you're obese, or overweight will do more than almost anything to increase your odds of conceiving properly, minus unless you had some crazy PFAS or other chemical exposure that is going to make it really hard for you to conceive.

I think we got the makings of a sick super business here. Combining with the last time we talked, we put together a great office that has a combined gym workout space. We get Steve Aoki to DJ it and we keep the party going until brunch. And, if you're looking to conceive, the coach is right there. I think we can put our—

And, we can put our shower full of hot dogs.

Yeah. Waffle stomping hot dogs just all day.

No, no, no. Only rule, if you get caught waffle stomping one time, you're out. That's it.

I'll clean the first one, but don't do it again.

I was thinking that the Fit Club, what is that space going to do during the day? And maybe would people want a workspace where they can also work out of? We haven't seen that, right?

I think if you had a combo gym with good classes, like, for example, today, every day, actually, every day that I'm at work, I'm like, I want to go to the gym right now. And I actually have to physically go to the gym. I mean, this was like Google put so many gyms on their campuses because people want to work out in the middle of the day.

This all just comes back to like WeWork had it right. And they had WeWork, which is sick. Every time I go to WeWork, I'm happy. It's beautiful. It's great. Costs like $29 a day to be at WeWork. And it's an amazing space. They had WeGrow. Did WeGrow. WeGrow was a preschool. that you could just put your kids at. So you could have your, your workspace, you could have your— it wasn't a daycare. But like, I think we should bring back coworking spaces with daycare in them. So that like, your life's just taken care of. Throw the gym in there, throw all sorts of stuff in there, throw, throw Brunchy Han in there, not making a plug, just saying while we're there, why not? I think we work at it right. Let's reanoint Adam. All in one flow.

You wanted to have you just live above it anyways. Though I think a little separation's nice. Maybe you live on this side of town, you go to your lifestyle super building on the other side of town. That sounds nice.

We bus, we live, we work.

I think the real problem is that Adam was charging licensing fees that were just way too hard to support the core WeWork business model. If you just get a founder that doesn't charge licensing fees to use the name of his company, probably that's a much more attractive asset to invest in.

I think that was overstated. I'm not sure of the specifics, but I just want to present the other side. Got to hear both sides.

Adam, you're an apologist over here. Erik's wearing his free Harvey Weinstein t-shirt as well.

I'm a fan of underdogs.

Like Harvey Weinstein?

Bill Cosby. I'm just kidding.

I'll take that one. Are you wearing a free Epstein shirt, Erik?

Epstein didn't kill himself. I'll just leave it at that. Nick, why don't you share any of your other ideas?

There was a big trend in 2013 of training people to become software developers. And, and they had things like Dev Bootcamp and things like that. And there was a whole thing where like, oh, these coal miners are getting laid off. Like, what should we do? Like, like, learn to code. The journalists are getting laid off. What should we do? Learn to code. I think what we need now is a bootcamp to turn all these software developers who are going to have no job because of AI back into coal miners so that countries in Europe who've turned off all of their nuclear reactors can Operate their coal mining plants with, with some competent miners because we don't have enough of them.

The circle of life.

Yeah.

So the classic Silicon Valley to West Virginia pipeline. It's an important and underutilized process.

Yeah.

And when, you know, when Google's laying people off, we can be like, yeah, bro, learn to mine.

That'd be great.

It's the opposite of the original vision for placement.

Yeah.

Instead of taking people from West Virginia and moving them to Austin, Texas, or moving them from San Francisco to West Virginia, it'll be great. It's like you'll get a 70% reduction in your cost of living adjusted wages, but at least you'll have a job.

Downskilling. I'm just going to be safe.

More legitimately, though, I do think that there's a lot of opportunity for people in tech to explore these other industries, The government is pushing a lot of money into reindustrializing America. There's really cool companies that are working on rebuilding the American industrial base and we'd be well suited to have engineers work on things that touch the physical world. It's like a big core competency that we have somewhat let slip over the past few decades.

Maybe a new food delivery app or something? Yeah, exactly.

We need a lot more of those. I think McDonald's delivery is just It's too slow. Let's get that very fast.

Is there any idea that's on the tip of your mind? Meaning, before I wrap the show, did someone want to express one more idea? Otherwise, we can leave it for next time.

But Erik, Quora for People, tell us about this.

Sure.

So it's basically a search engine around expertise. Like, who is the best, you know, on Twitter, I see it all the time. And on Facebook, like, who's the best investor in climate? I'm raising a round. Who should I talk to? Who's the best doctor in Miami? Who's the best accountant for early-stage startups?

Who can best clean this waffle stomp drain from my gym?

Justin can.

I'm going to New York City tomorrow. Who should I meet? Right? And there are these questions all over Twitter and Facebook, and they actually have pretty good engagement. And so I was thinking, they have good engagement, but there's no state that's stored. And so I was thinking you could have a social network just for these kinds of questions and you could scrape all the ones that are on Twitter. So you could actually bootstrap with a pretty big dataset. I found dozens of these with dozens of replies. And each time someone submits a reply, it would be on someone's profile. So you've been sort of— it's like an endorsement basically. I tried to do CoSign a few years ago. but there was no trigger. There was no reason to co-sign someone really. And if it's in response to a Q&A, you could sort of build out definitive profiles where people have been endorsed tens of times for a specific thing. And LinkedIn isn't really built for that. Right. And so that's the idea in general with AI. I'm excited to revisit a lot of these Social networks, professional networks that people thought were just too hard to recreate the dataset. But now thanks to generative AI, maybe you can recreate the dataset in an easier way.

I would wonder around distribution. In the past, the way that the first Web2 wave— Web2 really rode the wave of SEO as your distribution channel. So you went out and you did the hard work of gathering on-the-ground data. And generating a million landing pages, every permutation for every query. And if you had good data, then people didn't bounce and you accrued all the traffic. But that model seems to be going away, both largely first and foremost because Google itself is vertically integrating all of the high-value queries. So the only things that you can still rank for are low-value queries. And 2, because it feels like, as you mentioned, the AIs are going to just answer those questions. So I'd be curious if you built up this data asset, maybe you'd have to distribute it through ChatGPT as a ChatGPT plugin or something like that to keep it fresh and actually get users.

I think it's the perfect idea. No feedback.

Drop everything, Erik.

Do it now.

No, good feedback. Okay, let's wrap. As kind of an overview, which of the ideas have you heard today One, are you most likely to invest in? And 2, do you just want to exist and you can't pick your own idea?

I really want the software dev to coal miner pipeline to exist. I don't see how this isn't already a thing in the world and we'd do better with more of that.

I actually really like, and not even facetiously, the nighttime— what did you call it?

Fit club. Yeah, yeah.

Fit Club, I think it's a great idea.

And I would totally do that if I were— If there was a compelling entrepreneur listening to this and were like, hey, I just need a little bit of money to get off the ground, and you believed in their plan, would you support them if they gave you some good equity for it?

Sure.

Yeah, why not? I mean, I guess, yeah, I would support.

That's a binding commitment. So I would too. Depends how good the hot dogs are.

Yeah, I would spin out just the hot dogs in the shower part and just— I think, I think that's a, that's a fun idea.

Very private equity, Baron, of you. Strip it for parts.

That's the MBA in him talking.

Strip it for parts is going to be the cold open of this, of this show. Sean, Justin, Nick, uh, thank you for coming on. This was a banger, and until next time.

Thank you all. It was fun.

Bye everyone.

Thanks.

Upstream with Erik Torenberg is a show from Turpentine, the podcast network behind Moment of Zen and Cognitive Revolution.

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Turpentine is a network of podcasts, newsletters, and more covering tech, business, and culture, all from the perspective of industry insiders and experts. We're the network behind the show you're listening to right now. At Turpentine, we're building the first media outlet for tech people by tech people. We have a slate of hit shows across a range of topics and industries, from AI with Cognitive Revolution to Econ 102 with Noah Smith. Our other shows drive the conversation in tech with the most interesting thinkers, founders, and investors, like Moment of Zen, And my show Upstream. We're looking for industry-leading hosts and shows along with sponsors. If you think that might be you or your company, email me at erik@turpentine.co. That's erik@turpentine.co.